23 January 96:

22 January 96:

Daniel Jiang has placed some information on the CS252 TA Web Page about setting your system up to
read Acrobat/PDF files. See it here.

20 January 96:

Note: when printing papers from the Melvyl INSPEC database, the print headers will say the job is from
user Tulip (the browser application you are running was developed as part of the North Holland Tulip
Project for viewing journals on-line). Some of the public printers may not be up to the task. Please,
please, please try to use private/office printers whenever possible to print these jobs.

Course Overview

Ubiquitous access to information, anywhere, anyplace, and anytime, will
characterize whole new kinds of information systems in the 21st Century.
These are being enabled by rapidly emerging wireless communications systems,
based on radio and infrared transmission mechanisms, and utilizing such
technologies as cellular telephony, personal communications systems, wireless
PBXs, and wireless local area networks. These systems have the potential
to dramatically change society as workers become "untethered"
from their information sources and communications mechanisms. While there
is a rich body of knowledge associated with radio system engineering, the
needed expertise must build upon this to encompass network management, integration
of wireless and wireline networks, system support for mobility, computing
system architectures for wireless nodes/base stations/servers, user interfaces
appropriate for small handheld portable devices, and new applications that
can exploit mobility and location information.

Today, there exists no well-defined body of knowledge a student must learn
to become proficient in wireless communications and mobile information systems.
This is an emerging field, and builds on radio engineering, data communications,
computer networks, distributed systems, information management, and applications.
This course will follow an interdisciplinary "tall thin" approach,
making the physical limitations of communications technologies understandable
to the computer scientist, while making the system architecture and applications
accessible to the electrical engineer. In the long tradition of advanced
graduate courses at Berkeley, this one will combine extensive reading and
in-class discussion of the research literature with in-depth independent
research projects of the students' own choosing.

Course Curriculum

The material in the course, drawn mainly from the research literature, will
be presented in a bottom-up fashion. Communications technologies are presented
first, to form the foundation for further discussion. This is followed by
discussions of networking, distributed systems, and applications. Representative
topical details follow in the paragraphs below.